for many of us, there is no greater virtue in life than adhering to ones creed. For as long as one follows his heart, honors his beliefs and obeys his faith, rewards will come to him, from his god and from his community. The former will acknowledge his fidelity; the latter will respect his consistency and upstanding nature. But as much as having a code is respectable, too many of these strict adherents neglect life's most enduring lesson, that love powers human civilization.
Love of land and country, of partner and children, of neighbor and community... Love, in all its forms, makes us all threads in the tapestry of the world. It is the lubrication that makes enduring the friction of daily existence possible. No creed, no matter how wrathful its god, should ever supersede that. And yet, for some, it does, to the painful cost of their children. Ms. Scheeres' gripping memoir elaborates.
The moment her deeply conservative parents adopted two African-American boys into their otherwise pristinely white family, Julia Scheeres' life changed forever. For it introduced into her existence an angel and a devil, a friend and a foe, who would bless and scar her life for years to come. Brothers rescued from foster care, Julia found in David, the younger of the boys, a soulmate, a twin by spirit if not by blood. In Jerome, however, the older and stronger of the boys, she found an enemy, a pugnacious spirit who dealt with his won abuse by abusing others, chiefly, Julia who was far too scared to reveal to her fundamentalist parents what Jerome did to her at night.
A shy girl, Julia's adolescence in rural Indiana of the 1980s would've been challenging enough on its own. Undergoing this turbulent passage into adulthood with two black siblings, in an all-white county, was a recipe for social and emotional disaster. While fending off Jerome's cruel advances and being a supportive friend to David, she had to find herself, attend school, obey her parents' strict instructions and locate friends and allies all without any support or assistance from the outside world. No wonder then that, after operating under the pressure of such conflicting forces, she turned to sex and alcohol, unforgivable sins in the eyes of her parents, sins that would see her eventually banished to an intensely Christian reform school in the Caribbean where, in the footsteps of her miserable brother David, she labored to escape a harsh and abusive existence and build a life for herself from the wreckage of her childhood.
Though Jesus Land is, in the main, a shattering memoir, a first-hand recount of an impossibly challenging adolescence in a hopelessly idealized time in American history, it is also, inescapably, a vivid and confrontational expose of the cruelty that arises from religious dogma. Drawing from journals and other contemporaneous writings to reconstruct her adolescence, Ms. Scheeres chillingly captures both the macro and the micro level hypocrisy of the Christians she grew up with. The former is represented here by the youth of her all-white hometown, ostensibly wholesome kids who, nonetheless, used both verbal and physical abuse against Julia and David in sincerely unchristian assaults. The latter is represented by the author's parents who, in their insistence on a program of emotional neglect and physical abuse towards their adopted children, entirely undid any good they might've claimed to have done when they rescued David and Jerome from foster care. For instead of raising healthy, productive citizens, their parenting transformed Jerome into a sexually abusive felon and David into a bewildered, self-hating mourner. As such, anyone in search of proof that actions speak louder than words need look no further than the 320-odd pages of this electrifying and terrifying memoir.
There are problems here. Events from two-plus decades in ms. Scheeres' past are rendered in unerring detail, raising some doubts as to the authenticity of the narrative. One would have to virtually record ones entire life in order to reconstruct such a faithful representation of such distant events. Journals help, certainly, but some of the conversations here must have been necessarily re-imagined. This causes me to wonder if some of the cruelties described here have been unintentionally exaggerated, inflamed by the author's painful recollection of a childhood anyone would want to forget. But even the narrative is viewed through a skeptic's lens, it remains an engrossing and flabbergasting series of revelations about the nature of zealotry and its capacity to create monstrous human beings.
Religiosity is a scourge upon our societies. If believers actually adhered to the codes laid down for them by their gods, perhaps religion could be a force for good in our world. But it is demonstrably clear, both here and in the countless atrocities, large and small, committed in the name of religion, in express violation of religion's ethics, that believers only obey their commandments when it's convenient for them to do so, ignoring them when their hearts encourage them to be cruel.
Mesmerizing work. Considering the horror of Ms. Scheeres' formative years, it's a wonder she's functional. That she's created for herself a successful career in literature is remarkable. (4/5 Stars)
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